


A Rex By Any Other Name...

by Charity_Angel



Series: Tales from Kamino (and beyond) [1]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: (except one word), Gen, No Dialogue, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-17
Updated: 2016-10-17
Packaged: 2018-08-23 02:28:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8310229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charity_Angel/pseuds/Charity_Angel
Summary: ... probably wouldn't be Rex.
OR
How Rex got his (very Latin) name.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I blame [Merfilly](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Merfilly/pseuds/Merfilly) for this one. Honest. I'd never pondered on the origins of the name 'Rex' before now...
> 
> (Or that 'Rey' could be considered a feminine form)

756 Squad were down to six members. 7562 hadn’t made it out of his tank – he had developed some kind of anomaly in vitro that had stunted his growth; 7565 and 7566 both had a defect in their vision that had been picked up during early blaster training, and no-one had heard from them since; 7569 just couldn’t keep up with the rest of them in the classroom. He was now working in the kitchens, preparing their meals.

Six wasn’t the smallest number for a squad – there were squads both older and younger who had lost more brothers than that, although any fewer than four and they tended to be absorbed into other squads from the same batch. (There were rumours that 559 Squad had its eleven original members, but no-one believed that – not only did that mean they hadn’t lost a clone yet, but that they also had a pair of tube-mates. One or the other might be possible, but not both.)

7560, the de-facto leader of 756 Squad, would much rather not have been in that position, thanks. He was almost 7569’s opposite – he was light-years ahead of his other brothers, and read anything he could get his hands on. He could remember anything and everything he ever read or heard. He took to learning languages for fun, a hobby that their instructors applauded as they were likely to encounter all manner of species when they finally left Kamino. Every brother could speak Basic and Kaminoan, and they were learning Mando’a from their combat instructors, but 7560 also knew Rodian, Aqualish, Iridonian, Shyriiwook, and a dialect of Twi’lek specifically adapted for non-lek-bearing species to use. He had tried Togruta, but it was mostly above his hearing range. He was currently engrossed in the dead language of High Aurebesh. Most of his squad-mates couldn’t understand why he was learning something so useless as a dead language, and 7561, 7563, 7564, and 7568 voiced this opinion, loudly and often. 7567 just squeezed his shoulder and said he should do whatever he felt was best for his education.

7567 was an odd brother – occasionally, a brother slipped through the screening process who had brown hair instead of black. 7567 was blond. 7560 remembered the Long-Neck’s consternation when 7567’s hair had dried, back when they were just out of their tanks: they had been deeply worried about this thus-far uncatalogued mutation in the genome. They had watched 7567 throughout their childhood, scrutinised every move he had made, to make sure that he didn’t have any further defects.

Maybe it was because of their close observation, which they had taken no pains to hide, but 7567 was quieter than the average brother, and worked harder. He wasn’t as far ahead in his lessons as 7560, but he was much further ahead in his lessons than their other four squad-mates.

It could have made him hard-hearted, but it in fact had the opposite effect – 7567 helped them all if he could; he encouraged them when they did badly during their training, congratulated them when they achieved something special. The Long-Necks might consider 7560 the leader purely because of his designation, but the rest of the squad, and their combat instructors, knew it was 7567.

(7567 wasn’t the only blond brother – one popped up every dozen or so batches, as did the red-heads. He just had the misfortune of being the first.)

Target was the first of them to take a name. A few of their older brothers had names because they liked being a little different to everyone else – it was something that made them stand apart. But perhaps one clone in a hundred had a name. They weren’t names like the Long-Necks had, or civilians, but something that meant something to the brother; something that suited them.

7563 was the best shooter of all of them: he was the first to hit the target at all, and consistently did well, boosting the squad’s practice scores to levels that older squads were impressed with. One of the older kids called him ‘Target’ once, and he adopted it immediately.

As good as Target was on the standard range, 7564 outstripped him significantly when it came to long-range. Snipe found he enjoyed the attention it brought him just as much as Target did.

Slowly but surely, the brothers of the 756 Squad found their niches, and their names. 7560 managed to acquire the name ‘Lingo’ from 7567. 7568 discovered that he was good with computers, and became Byte. 7561 fought dirty during hand-to-hand, and Lingo had suggested ‘Dent’, the High Aurebesh word for tooth.

Suddenly, all eyes were on them – would they be the first squad to all gain names? Even older squads hadn’t managed it yet. It was just 7567 to go, but nothing seemed to fit him.

Their older brothers would bandy about names during mealtimes, to see if anything took 7567’s fancy. Nothing seemed to, but other brothers would seize upon something occasionally. That was how Jesse and Cody ended up with their names – from a HoloNet database of human boy’s names that Jesse and Byte had acquired without the Long-Necks’ knowledge.

But nothing seemed to fit. His stand-out skill was his leadership, but he scowled at any name that suggested anything like it. He was too self-depreciating for anything like that and, besides, he wasn’t in the leadership programme like Cody was.

But 7567 didn’t need the training to exude the kind of leadership that Cody was learning in a classroom – he came by it naturally. It was like he had been born to lead, like the kings that some worlds had. But 7567 was never going to go for ‘King’, any more than he had ‘Duke’ or ‘Lord’, or any variant.

“Rex,” Lingo blurted suddenly. It was the old Aurebesh word, but no-one but him would know that. Well, except that as 7567 considered it carefully instead of dismissing it like he had everything else, Jesse was looking it up on his name database, and grinning wildly as he found the entry.

7567 nodded his approval slowly, and suddenly 756 Squad was the Named Squad. Because, as Jesse said, it wasn’t right for them to all have names, and yet still use their sequential number for the squad as a whole.


End file.
